Post by ekswitaj on Oct 7, 2008 22:32:49 GMT 2
Wisdom and Wit:
The Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, Gloria Fuertes, and Adelia Prado - by Ada Jill Schneider
The Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, Gloria Fuertes, and Adelia Prado - by Ada Jill Schneider
In a poetic climate where the predominant styles tend to be either confessional or poetically ornate, I find myself drawn to a different model for poetry, one that combines the attributes of wisdom and wit. Wisdom is defined as knowledge and judgment based on learning and consideration of experience; it forces us into deeper visions of what is true and right and implies a concern with values. If wisdom suggests erudition, the definition of wit suggests natural ability, maybe a temperament or a gift, rather than something acquired. It is associated with the present tense, rather than with wisdom’s appreciation of lasting values. Wit is the power to perceive quickly and express clever ideas that are unusual, striking, and amusing; it serves to undermine pretension. Wit alone in poetry can tend toward the merely clever, while wisdom alone can lead toward pretense or very somber poetry, but together they become two poles that create a tension and keep each other balanced. When accessibility is added to wisdom and wit on the written page, then I am utterly drawn in, totally enticed. This is an author with whom I would love to have a conversation. Accessibility promotes openness, sharing; it extends an invitation to become involved, to form a relationship. “Let’s talk,” it says.
I want to talk about the work of three passionate, intelligent poets—Wislawa Szymborska, Gloria Fuertes, and Adelia Prado—poets who address universal questions of life, death, and justice with words that are unpretentious, profound, and clever. These women speak from long historical and social experience and are secure in themselves. They write with philosophical introspection, with linguistic inventiveness, and with courage. Since historical and social forces greatly inform the work of these poets, let us briefly examine these forces and then focus in on the nature of wisdom and wit as it is revealed in their poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, was born in Poland in 1923. She came of age during World War II when Poland was under Nazi occupation; she lived under Stalinism and then under Polish martial law. In The Witness of Poetry, Czeslaw Milosz states: “…one can say that what occurred in Poland was an encounter of (a) European poet with the hell of the twentieth century, not hell’s first circle, but a much deeper one” (79).
The experience of disintegration during the war years probably marked Polish poetry so firmly because the order established after the war was artificial, imposed from above and in conflict with those organic bonds that survived, such as the family and parish church. One striking feature of Polish poetry in recent decades has been its search for equilibrium amid chaos and the complete fluidity of all values. (89)
We can see this political evolution reflected in Szymborska’s poetry. Her two early works, which she has since renounced, embraced the official Stalinist-Socialist propaganda and glorified communism. In her third collection published in 1957, Calling Out to Yeti, which Szymborska considers her actual debut into poetry, Yeti or the Abominable Snowman is commonly believed to represent Joseph Stalin. The Swedish Academy actually acknowledged that it awarded Szymborska her Nobel Prize on the basis of her poetry written since 1957, citing Calling Out to Yeti as a reaction against Stalin. In this volume she allows herself to view the world from different sides and in many ways. “We’ve inherited hope,” she says, “the gift of forgetting.” Later, under Polish martial law in the 1980s,
Szymborska published in the exile periodical Kultura Paryska in Paris and in the underground Arka in Poland under the pen-name Stancy Kowna. The name itself is quite significant. Stanczykowna, the prototype of the pseudonym, was the most famous Polish jester. He made history as the person who, while playing the clown, could deliver the most bitter truth and whose political wisdom was highly valued by the king. There is certainly enough irony, sadness, and truth about life in Szymborska’s writing to indicate why she chose Stanczykowna as her master. (Gajer 1140)
Using the Polish jester’s name is a sign of how Szymborska’s vision includes both wisdom and wit, one tempering the other, avoiding easy irony and self-important sagacity. Once the political climate permitted Polish poets to speak their minds free of censorship, “…stylistic clarity became a matter (and form) of ethics, a response to ideological obfuscations, political double talk” (Hirsch 110, Wilson Quarterly). This is precisely one of the remarkable aspects of Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry. She transforms her intellectual inquisitiveness, her experience, and her philosophical musings into poetry that is eminently understandable. Not that she offers ready answers, but in dressing life’s conundrums in “clothes” we can relate to and objects we own, Szymborska has a way of touching reality, touching universality, hitting home, as it were. In her acceptance speech for the 1991 Goethe Award, she remarked that “…even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild, and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric” (Trzeciak 62). From this same fabric, in her quest for the truth, she pulls at threads of history, philosophy, and general life experience and then asks questions. Like a scientist, she turns her subject upside down and inside out, looks it up one side and down the other, then for good measure, she shakes it out. Part of her wit comes from the way she analyses ideas from an unexpected perspective with an ironic twist. From her book, View with a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, here is the poem, “The Century’s Decline”:
“The Century’s Decline”
Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.
Too many things have happened
that weren’t supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.
Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.
Fear was expected to leave the mountains and valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.
A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore:
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.
There was going to be respect
for helpless people’s helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.
Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.
Stupidity isn’t funny.
Wisdom isn’t gay.
Hope
isn’t that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.
God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.
“How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.
Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naïve ones.
As an American, I haven’t lived through the horrors Wislawa Szymborska has had to endure. Maybe it has to do with being a certain age but I find this disappointment, this loss of idealism (mine and the poem’s) heartbreaking. Surely, I thought, the United Nations would work in harmony and peace and brotherhood would prevail one day. She could have written this for me. Her statements and questions sometimes seem simple or obvious or as she says, naïve. The wisdom of her poetry lies in the fact that she keeps pressing these questions deeper and deeper, taking surprising turns. For example, she will often undermine her own depiction of ideals by using a kind of casual off-hand slang that seems dismissive of the ideal to which it relates. Wit in these tonal changes helps to avoid pretension. “There was going to be respect / for helpless people’s helplessness, / trust, that kind of stuff.” Further down, she goes on to say “Stupidity isn’t funny, / Wisdom isn’t gay. / Hope / isn’t that young girl anymore, / et cetera, alas.” Then there are the superb lines in which she points out that “good and strong / are still two different men.” She takes a personal turn in the penultimate stanza, which makes the poem moving: “ ‘How should we live?’ someone asked me in a letter.” Most often she leaves it to the reader try to figure out the answer, if indeed there is an answer.
What inspires Szymborska to ask these questions? Perhaps an answer is suggested in her 1996 Nobel Lecture where this very private and almost reclusive poet stated that inspiration was not the exclusive domain of poets and artists but comes to anybody open to new challenges.
There is, there has been, there always will be, a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners—I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’ (Baranczak and Cavanagh xiii)
I don’t know—“a small phrase,” Szymborska says, “but it flies on mighty wings.” I don’t know. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe maybe. What I know, like Szymborska, is that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
“Maybe All This”
Maybe all this
is happening in some lab?
Under one lamp by day
and billions by night?
Maybe we’re experimental generations?
Poured from one vial to the next,
shaken in test tubes,
not scrutinized by eyes alone,
each of us separately
plucked up by tweezers in the end?
Or maybe it’s more like this:
No interference?
The changes occur on their own
according to plan?
The graph’s needle slowly etches
its predictable zigzags?
Maybe thus far we aren’t of much interest?
The control monitors aren’t plugged in?
Only for wars, preferably large ones,
for the odd ascent above our clump of earth,
for major migrations from point A to B?
Maybe just the opposite:
They’ve got a taste for trivia up there?
Look! on the big screen a little girl
is sewing a button on her sleeve.
The radar shrieks,
the staff comes at a run.
What a darling little being
with its tiny heart beating inside it!
How sweet, its solemn
threading of the needle!
Someone cries enraptured:
Get the Boss,
tell him he’s got to see this for himself!
Who is examining us from above, the poet wonders. Are they interested in our wars? Maybe only in our minutiae. What can they be thinking as they hold us under a magnifying glass or is it a large screen monitor? Maybe they have reduced us to our very essence and placed us in test tubes for research. I admire Szymborska’s leap from one metaphor to the next. She goes from test tubes to tweezers, graph needles, monitors, and then picks up on needles again in the sewing. Once again, she is looking at an issue from many, many sides, an indication of a wise thinker. See, in the last stanza, how she has taken a sweet scene and rendered it ominous. The girl is suddenly seen as at the mercy of invisible powerful forces, and she is reduced to an “it,” a kind of pet in their eyes, not a dignified individual with a sense of freedom and action in the world. They watch, amused, but with no empathy.
Temperamentally and ideologically, Szymborska is a poet of moderation and skepticism. She prefers understatement to confident assertion, ambivalence to resolve, doubt to dogmatism, concreteness to abstraction, particularity to typicality, and exception to rules. (Her) typical dynamic (is) “on the one hand” / “on the other hand.”…She attempts to reconstruct a full picture, which for her…includes at once the truth and falsity about each thing. (Bojanowska 199)
Much of the time Szymborska tells “the truth and falsity of each thing” with ironic wit. “Her depiction of events such as war and other atrocities, often include an element of the absurd…” (Trzeciak 68). In one of her most famous early poems, “Brueghel’s Two Monkeys,” she uses Pieter Brueghel’s 1562 painting as a metaphor for life under a totalitarian regime. The fact that it was probably Bruegel’s intention to portray the oppression of Flanders under Spanish authority gives the poem a double sense of irony. “Monkeys were commonly used to represent man’s bondage to his beastial side, and the (painting) can be seen as a blend of local scenery and didactic commentary on human weakness”(Foote 69). In the painting, two powerless monkeys are chained to the windowsill in a massive tower overlooking the waterfront section of Antwerp. The monkeys represent the Flemish people. Four hundred years later, for Szymborska they represent the not only the Flemish or the Poles, but all of mankind. One monkey, seated on his haunches, looks out the window at the Bay of Antwerp while the other monkey hangs his head in bewilderment.
“Brueghel’s Two Monkeys”
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.
The exam is the History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away—
but when it’s clear I don’t know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
The sky and the sea will remain, says Szymborska, but what of mankind? There is such cruelty and suffering that she isn’t sure of the answers. Judging from history alone, the future does not look bright. Everyone seems ineffective, powerless to make changes. That the monkeys are the examiners suggests a bit of irony toward intellectuals or the philosophical community. One monkey is disdainful while the other is a dreamer. Does Szymborska see both stances as connected to bondage? There’s some kind of profound irony in the dreamer prompting her “with a gentle clinking of his chain.” Has he totally accepted his bondage as normal? Or is it that awareness or acknowledgment of our chains is a necessary aspect of our wisdom? Maybe the only wisdom shown here is the speaker’s not knowing what to say. “…Szymborska has mounted in her work a witty and tireless defense of individual subjectivity against collectivist thinking, and her poems are slyly subversive in a way that compels us to reconsider received opinion.” Edward Hirsch points out. “She manages,” he adds, “to question herself even as she exposes general assumptions and undermines political cant” (Hirsch, Wilson Quarterly). In The Soul of Witz: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud, “Witz” [wit] says Carl Hill “…is a most untrustworthy ally of absolutism…”(16). Making the examiners monkeys in chains is one example of what Hill is saying. He further elaborates:
As the sparkling, humorous side of wit becomes more and more accentuated, menacing ambiguities begin to appear. Irony (can be used) to disguise one’s true thoughts against political repression; wit becomes a means of saying one thing and meaning another, splitting truth off from its representation. Wit moves to subvert the ‘natural sign’ of homogeneous and totalitarian truth at whose court it formerly served. In the intellectual free market that it opens up, no point of view gets any special privileges.”( 24)
Wit requires a certain amount of distance and a focus on something other than autobiography. The self is the observer more than the subject of observation. Szymborska’s image of the observers in “Maybe All This” certainly suggests distance. Perhaps it’s what Milosz talks about in The Witness of Poetry: the need for aesthetic distance in order to avoid bathos or the false perceptions of nostalgia, or a kind of true-believer blindness.
Whereas Wislawa Szymborska lived through World War II, Stalinism, and Polish martial law, Gloria Fuertes, who was born in Spain in 1918, came of age during the Spanish Civil War. Government policies of absolutism in Spain are “as ascribable to the forty years of Franco’s dictatorship as to the centuries of Inquisitorial domination,” states Sylvia Sherno in her essay, “Carnival: Death and Renewal in the Poetry of Gloria Fuertes.” “Even a cursory glance at the Spanish architectural landscape, configured by monuments like El Escorial and the Valle de los Caidos, reveals a history of grim authoritarianism and inflexible dogmatism” (371).
Such a history has provided rich and fertile ground for the rebellious inversion of the official order, which is the primary activity of the grotesque imagination. Among the poets of post-Civil War Spain, Gloria Fuertes is a beneficiary of the Spanish grotesque tradition. (She) shares with the first generation of postwar poets her view of poetry as an instrument for righting the social injustices born of the Civil War and its aftermath. Like those of the second generation, Fuertes has committed herself to the distinctly personal creative vision only made possible by the breakdown of the earlier repressive system. (370)
In the poem, “It’s Useless,” from her book, [i[Off the Map[/i], edited and translated by Philip Levine and Ada Long, we can see that rebellious inversion operating.
“It’s Useless”
It’s useless at this date
to start punishing the rose and the bird,
useless to burn candles in the hallways,
useless to prohibit anything,
like speaking,
eating meat,
drinking books,
traveling for nothing on the streetcars,
desiring certain creatures,
smoking grass,
telling the truth,
loving your enemy,
it’s a waste of time to prohibit anything.
There are announcements in the papers,
there are posters stuck on every corner
that prohibit the eating of fried birds,
but they never stop the roasting of men,
the eating of naked men with a gun’s hunger.
Why are birds protected by those
who execute the seventh and fifth commandments?
Have they protected the Korean children?
Men go on eating them in white sauce.
The patron of animals is making a fool of herself.
Have they stopped the eating of innocent fish,
pure and tender lambs,the sad sea bass,
partidges?
And what can you say
about Mariquita Perez
for whom expensive coats are bought
while there are girls without dolls or clothes?
The sick work,
the old exercise,
they sell heroin in all the bars,
teen-agers are for sale,
and all this goes on officially.
Get it straight, nobody does anything just because he’s good-hearted.
You’ve got to go nuts and start screaming:
“As long as you murder, I’ll eat fried birds!”
With courage and clarity, wisdom and wit, Gloria Fuertes shoots straight from the hip. Using the technique of reversal, she consistently points out that the authorities place higher value on lesser things, whereas what we would consider most important is debased. How hypocritical it is, she is saying in “It’s Useless,” what utter nonsense it is to prohibit eating fried birds when it is not illegal to kill each other in warfare. She can’t abide the injustice of a doll being better dressed than children. How sick is it when teenagers sell their bodies and dealers sell drugs right in front of official eyes? “As long as you murder,” she protests, “I’ll eat fried birds.” What a marvelous social conscience Fuertes has. Through poetry, she bears witness with her rebellious imagination. The concept of grotesque poetry (incorporating the use of slang, humor, and wordplay) runs through Fuertes’ work. Sylvia Sherno suggests that the word “carnival,” as used by Mikhail Bakhtin, refers to the market place and forms of folk humor which arose in the Middle Ages, is an apt description for Fuertes’ poetry. “For Bakhtin,” she quotes, “the grotesque character of popular parodical literature is perhaps carnival’s greatest triumph, for the very ambivalence of praise and degradation echoes the eternally ‘unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growing and becoming’ ” (370). “Laughter serves as a catalyst for the poet’s defiance, and enables her to overturn the structures and dogmas of official culture.” (380). Fuertes’ wit is louder in a sense, more exuberant than Szymborska’s. She is less skeptical about her values. Perhaps that is connected to how she defines her place in society.
Fuertes was born to poor, working class parents. It is very easy to spot injustice when you are poor; you grow up with it around you. You dream a lot.. As she says in her poem, “Painted Windows”: “I lived in a house/ with two real windows and the other two painted on.” The ending reads: “I spent my whole childhood wanting/ to lean out and see what could be seen/ from the windows that weren’t there.” Unlike Szymborska whose credo is “I don’t know,” Fuertes insists she knows. In her introduction to the poems, Ada Long says, “The world Fuertes sees contains much that is wrong, and what she writes about it is both frank and clear. Hers are not poems of doubt, uncertainty, qualification or ambiguity. What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong, and all you have to do to see the difference is look” (Fuertes 4).
“Now”
Now I’m going to tell you
how the worms
I fed on mulberry leaves
in an empty soap carton
changed themselves without my help
into long fluffs of color,
and how later I saw them
transformed into butterflies,
and all this because it was May
and insects are, in their way, magicians.
I’ll tell you
how Eloisa Muro,
the fourth mistress of Cervantes,
wrote Don Quixote.
Because though tiny, I know many things,
and my body is an endless eye
through which, unfortunately, I see everything.
If one has a strong social conscience, seeing everything is unfortunate in that one feels obliged to do something about perceived wrongs. Therefore Fuertes not only sees and knows, she feels she must say it. In “I Write Poems,” she says: “I write poems, gentlemen, I write poems…/ there are cases…however they / never give houses to the poor who don’t have them ./…to the petty tyrant no one talks back; / we read the deaths and turn the pages; / they step on our necks and we don’t get up; / All this happens, gentlemen, and I must say it.” Unlike Szymborska, who is reclusive, Fuertes is a social poet who loves connecting with people. She believes in the healing powers of poetry and feels that poets can help others by addressing social ills. One reason Fuertes may be more engaged or hopeful about social change through poetry is that she identifies with the oppressed. Someone who survived the war in Poland without going to the camps probably doesn’t have that luxury, but rather has to see him or herself as part of the whole corrupt system, even if he or she did fight in the underground.
Gloria Fuertes spreads her message in words that people understand. It is an aspect of her wisdom, which is not meant to be pretentious, but communicable to others. Sometimes her nerve is astounding. A devoted believer, she nonetheless rebukes God from time to time, as in “Prayer to Keep Going” where she says: “Give us this day / our daily whipping, / and forgive us our little flings / as we swallow those of our masters, / but don’t let us puke on them.” She goes so far as to call God “the Great What’s His Name” in her tongue-in-cheek poem, “The Skinny Women.
“The Skinny Women”
The skinny women of the foundry workers
keep on hatching at home or on the streetcar.
Some of the boys go to the public schools
and learn the rivers by heart because it’s nice to know.
The girls go to the nuns who teach them girl work and praying.
Bit by bit the traces of mortar fire are wiped from the city.
And the months go by!
…………………………………………………………………
In dreams I’ve seen several Mr. Bigs
talking around a table about exchange rates,
about ships, planes, about the cornices
that are going to collapse when the bombs drop.
And I beg pardon of the Great What’s His Name
for wishing them each a good pine box
and four of the most expensive candles.
This “poetry mirrors the ancient dichotomies of reverence and subversion, manifested on the one hand by prayers, litanies, and verses in the contemplative vein; on the other hand, by diatribes, reprimands, and billingsgate,” says Sherno. “Poetry…is the continuing process by which (Fuertes) denounces official culture and reaffirms her faith in popular renewal” (371-372). Though many of her poems dwell on the great divide between haves and have-nots or on loneliness in our world, when Fuertes writes of love, she literally jumps for joy. Ten years ago I found her poem, “When I Hear Your Name,” in a small paperback anthology, Waltzing on Water: Poetry by Women. I fell in love with the unabashed exuberance of the piece.
“When I Hear Your Name”
When I hear your name
I feel a little robbed of it;
it seems unbelievable
that half a dozen letters could say so much.
My compulsion is to blast down every wall with your name,
I’d paint it on all the houses,
there wouldn’t be a well
I hadn’t leaned into
to shout your name there,
nor a stone mountain
where I hadn’t uttered
those six separate letters
that are echoed back.
My compulsion is
to teach the birds to sing it,
to teach the fish to drink it,
to teach men that there is nothing
like the madness of repeating your name.
My compulsion is to forget altogether
the other 22 letters, all the numbers,
the books I’ve read, the poems I’ve written.
To say hello with your name.
To beg bread with your name.
“She always says the same thing,” they’d say when they saw me,
and I’d be so proud, so happy, so self-contained.
And I’ll go to the other world with your name on my tongue,
and all their questions I’ll answer with your name
the judges and saints will understand nothing—
God will sentence me to repeating it endlessly and forever.
You can almost see the ecstatic speaker dancing, twirling around, arms straight out at her sides, ready to embrace the entire universe. If I were granted one feeling in life, this is the one I would choose.
I think Adelia Prado might be the first to agree. Her poetry “is a poetry of abundance,” says Ellen Watson who translated Prado’s book, The Alphabet in the Park. “The appeal of (her) poems has to do with their wonderful specificity, their nakedness, and their desire to embrace everything in sight—as well as things invisible” (ix). Prado, who uses some of Gloria Fuertes’ techniques―the inversions, the hyperbole, can also be described as a grotesque poet within Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnival formula.” Her “poems overflow with the humble, grand, various stuff of daily life—necklaces, bicycles, fish; saints and prostitutes and presidents; innumerable chickens and musical instruments…And, seemingly at every turn, there is food” (vii).
Adelia Prado was born in Brazil in 1936 to a family of laborers, “full of life and small expectations” (Watson ix). I’ll let her tell you about herself.
“Denouement”
I have a great admiration for ships
and for certain people’s handwriting which I attempt to imitate.
Of my entire family, I’m the only one who has seen the ocean.
I describe it over and over; they say “hmm”
and continue circling the chicken coop with wire.
I tell about the spume, and the wearisome size of the waters;
they don’t remember there’s such a place as Kenya,
they’d never guess I’m thinking of Tanzania.
Eagerly they show me the lot: this is where the kitchen will be,
that’s where we’ll put the garden.
So what do I do with the coast?
It was a pretty afternoon the day I planted myself in the window, between uncles,
and saw the man with his fly open,
the trellis angry with roses.
Hours and hours we talked unconsciously in Portuguese
as if it were the only language in the world.
Faith or no, I ask where are my people who are gone;
because I’m human, I zealously cover the pan of leftover sauce.
How could we know how to live a better life than this,
when even weeping it feels so good to be together?
Suffering belongs to no language.
I suffered and I suffer both in Minas Gerais and at the edge of the ocean.
I stand in awe of being alive. Oh, moon over the backlands,
oh, forests I don’t need to see to get lost in,
oh, great cities and states of Brazil that I love as if I had invented them.
Being Brazilian places me in a way I find moving
and this, which without sinning I can call fate,
gives my desire a rest.
Taken all at once, it’s far too intelligible; I can’t take it.
Night! Make yourself useful and cover me with sleep.
Me and the thought of death just can’t get used to each other.
I’ll tremble with fear until the end.
And meanwhile everything is so small.
Compared to my heart’s desire
the sea is a drop.
Prado is at home in Minas Gerais; she loves her people passionately. “How could we know how to live a better life than this,” she asks, “when even weeping it feels so good to be together?” Then again, she is not at home. Though they all speak Portuguese “as if it were the only language in the world,” not one of them shares Prado’s intellectual life. She describes the ocean (they have never seen) and they just “say ‘hmmm’ / and continue circling the chicken coop with wire.” On one hand, this; on the other hand, that. These contradictory impulses sound very much like the thinking of Wislawa Szymborska. Though Adelia Prado shares with Szymborska the concern with truth and falsity, she tends to turn them on their head like Fuertes. “(Prado) wants to hold on to the literal (covering the pan of leftover sauce) but she likes to get lost in the forests of her imagination,” states Ira Sadoff in his essay, “Transformation and Surprise: The Restoration of Imagination.” “It seems there is no pleasing her. She asks for sleep, for dream, to give her peace, but the dream of course is the location of the infinite and unlocatable imagination that is always working” (43). In another way, though, everything pleases Prado. She defines her tensions and then embraces them all. The fear of death and the pleasure of life seem to go hand in hand. Embrace is her overriding response to everything, unlike Szymborska whose arguments are more logical. Szymborska may use an allegorical figure like Yeti, but we are pretty clear about her conclusions. With Prado, it’s her state of mind that is clear within the tumble and jumble of the widely different values she catalogues. Like Szymborska, Prado asks question after question. “So what do I do with the coast?” she wonders in a simple yet complex query that sums up her dilemma: reconciling practical life with life of the mind, suffering with awe, and fate with desire.
Like Gloria Fuertes, Prado rages and rails at government bureaucracy and at God in colloquial, earthy language. In “Falsetto,” for example, she says “The authorities have bags under their eyes / and practical voices for communiqués: / We guarantee the best solution on the spot. / Which spot? The pudendum? / God already took care of that, covering it with hair.” Then she takes on God and the church:
“I am an old woman with whom God toys.
Along with rage and shame
my appetite remains unshakable—
fatty meats, anything floury,
I nibble vegetables as if they were carnal encounters,
I am afraid of death
and think about it at great length
as if I were a respectable, serious
prudent and frugal lady-philosopher.
If someone will join me, I’ll found a political party,
I’ll overthrow the government, the papacy
bulldoze all the rectories…
Sounds of the Mass and biblical verses, rhythms of colloquial Portuguese run through Prado’s work. “The interplay of these various levels of diction reflects and underlines the constant play between human and divine in the sensibility that fuels the poems”(Watson x). There is something refreshing in this honest poetry. It is intelligent yet not cerebral, emotional yet not insufferable. It speaks to us directly, clearly, seriously, with a certain down to earth wit, mixing up categories and surprising our expectations. She celebrates appetite, which probably cuts against the grain of any culture, especially when women do it. In “Concerted Effort,” Prado insists that desire goes on despite the knowledge of death. “After the grave,” she says, “the clock goes on ticking. Someone makes coffee, everybody drinks it.” Life will not let her throw her arms up and whine. Her poetry “ends up brimming with joy.” She knows that poetry will save her.
“Guide”
Poetry will save me.
I feel uneasy saying this, since only Jesus
is Saviour, as a man inscribed
(of his own free will)
on the back of the souvenir crucifix he brought home
from a pilgrimage to Congonhas.
Nevertheless, I repeat: Poetry will save me.
It’s through poetry that I understand the passion
He had for us, dying on the cross.
Poetry will save me, as the purple of flowers
spilling over the fence
absolves the girl her ugly body.
In poetry the Virgin and the saints approve
my apocryphal way of understanding words
by their reverse, my decoding the town crier’s message
by means of his hands and eyes.
Poetry will save me. I won’t tell this to the four winds,
because I’m frightened of experts, excommunication,
afraid of shocking the fainthearted. But not of God.
What is poetry, if not His face touched
by the brutality of things?
If the man’s inscription on the back of a souvenir crucifix represents language that is not poetic, let us look at what Prado associates with poetry: passion spilling over, apocryphal ways, reversals, decoding the town crier’s official version of things. Poetry, to her, is subversive, questioning, impassioned, shocking. It brings together disparate things the way those stunning last lines bring together God and the brutality of things.
If Adelia Prado feels poetry can save her, Gloria Fuertes feels poetry can save the world. It can “mediate between the forces of life and death. (Poetry) heals souls wounded by the pain of loneliness and staves off the inevitable approach of death” (Shern 390). Wislawa Szymborska, on the other hand, is less sanguine about what poetry can do in the world—not negative, just less hopeful. In a quote from Edward Hirsch’s article on in “The New York Times Magazine” (46-50), Szymborska states: “At the very beginning of my creative life, I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind…It is my strong belief that poetry can not save the world. It may help the individual reader to think. It may enrich his spiritual life. Reading it, one may feel a little less alone.”
Reading the books of these three women makes one grateful for the expert translators who rendered these foreign language poems into English. In “The Antioch Review,” Jacqueline Osherow has this to say about translation:
I love reading poetry in translation. I suppose this has to do with the way you experience what you’re reading as inaccessible, so that the poem, elusive as it necessarily is, becomes, itself, almost an object of poetic longing. But there are also less heady reasons for reading poems in languages we don’t know. One can go on and on about what is not translatable in poetry…but I want to focus here…on what isn’t lost in translation. It seems to me that we in America—especially as we scramble to find places for ourselves in the line-up, say, language poetry to new formalism—put far too much weight on a poem’s surface. What the pleasures of poems in translation prove…is that there is something essentially poetic that does not inhere merely in a poem’s surface. Call it substance. Call it thought. Call it wild association. What poetry does with these…imaginative possibilities is at least as interesting as what it does with language. (222)
Szymborska, Fuertes, and Prado are well known and loved in their respective countries—Poland, Spain, and Brazil. All three speak both universally and as women individuating themselves from social and cultural stereotypes. Though they are not affiliated with specific literary styles, each of them has attained critical acclaim and a huge public following. Ten thousand copies of Szymborska’s 1976 book, A Great Number, (no pun intended) sold out within a week. Her work is included in school curricula. The poem, “Nothing Twice,” which has been endlessly quoted in book reviews and press releases when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was turned into a pop hit single by a rock star. The beautiful ending reads: “With smiles and kisses, we prefer / to seek accord beneath our star, / although we’re different (we concur) / just as two drops of water are.” I’ll dance to that!
Gloria Fuertes appeared on children’s television in the 1970s, reciting poetry and stories every weekday afternoon for four years. To foster an interest in literature, she traveled to the Spanish provinces to read to illiterate people and people too poor to buy books. Adelia Prado’s poems and prose were turned into a one-woman theatrical production, performed by a famous Brazilian actress, that played to packed houses on a national tour.
It isn’t any wonder that these three word-loving, life-loving, philosophical poets are popular. They take nothing for granted; they question everything and everybody—God, government, outer space, themselves, relatives, and us as well. In countries where people have seen extremes of suffering like Poland and Spain, and where culture was seen as betraying people or as an escape from reality, artists like Szymborska and Fuertes seem to feel responsible to speak to these issues and not to drift toward art for art’s sake or purely personal discovery. Prado, from Brazil, seems very intent on redressing the status quo of economic power and rebelling against a culture that limits the roles and images of women.
In addressing the world, the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, Gloria Fuertes, and Adelia Prado combine the personal with the public. They show us how to suffer without leaving celebration behind and how to celebrate without ignoring suffering. These women challenge society and its traditions. They catch us with their insight, their brilliant turn of a phrase, their universality, and their accessibility. And, once caught, we revel in their wisdom and wit.
Works Cited
Bojanowska, Edyta M. “Wislawa Szymborska: Naturalist and Humanist.” Slavic
and East European Journal. Summer 1997 v4 n2. 199.
Foote, Timothy. The World of Bruegel. New York: Time-Life Books, 1968.
Fuertes, Gloria. Off the Map: Selected Poems. Trans. and eds. Philip Levine
and Ada Long. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1984.
Gajer, Ewa. “Polish Poet Wislawa Szymborska.” Hecate. Australia: Hecate Press. May 1997 v23nl. 1140.
Hirsch, Edward. “Wislawa Szymborska.” The New York Times Magazine.
1 Dec. 1996. 46-50.
___. The Wilson Quarterly. Spring 1997 v21 n2. 110.
Mazer, Norma Fox and Lewis, Marjorie, eds. Waltzing on Water: Poetry by
Women. New York: Dell, 1989.
Milosz, Czeslaw. The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1983.
Prado, Adelia. The Alphabet in the Park. Trans. Ellen Watson. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
Osherow, Jacqueline. “So These Are the Himalayas: the Poetry of Wislawa
Symborska.” The Antioch Review. Spring1997 v55n2 222.
Sadoff, Ira. “Transformation and Surprise: The Restoration of Imagination.”
The American Poetry Review. March April 1995. v24n2 43.
Sherno, Sylvia. “Carnival: Death and Renewal in the Poetry of Gloria Fuertes”
Modern Language Notes. 1989 v104 n2 370.
Szymborska, Wislawa. Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems. Trans.
Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981.
___. View With a Grain of Sand. Trans. and eds. Stanislaw Baranczak
and Clare Cavanagh. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
___. Poems New and Collected 1957-1997. Trans.Stanislaw Baranczak
and Clare Cavanagh. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998.
Trzeciak, Joan. “Wislawa Szymborska:The Enchantment of Everyday Objects.”
Publishers Weekly 7 April 1997 v224 n14 68.